Serendipity35 - RESOURCES

I Am In a Strange Loop

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 16:00:00 +0000

I inherited a copy of Douglas Hofstadter's book, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, when I started working at NJIT in 2000. It was my lunch reading. I read it in almost daily spurts. I often had to reread because it is not light reading.

It was published in 1979 and won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. It is said to have inspired many a student to pursue computer science, though it's not really a CS book. It was further described on its cover as a "metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll." In the book itself, he says, "I realized that to me, Godel and Escher and Bach were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence. I tried to reconstruct the central object and came up with this book."

I had not finished the book when I left NJIT, and it went on a shelf at home. This past summer I was trying to thin out my too-many books and I came upon it again with its bookmark glowering at me from just past the halfway point of the book. So, I went back to reading it. Still, tough going, though very interesting.

I remembered writing a post here about the book (it turned out to be from 2007) when I came upon a new book by Hofstadter titled I Am a Strange Loop. That "strange loop" was something he originally proposed in the 1979 book.

The earlier book is a meditation on human thought and creativity. It mixes the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. In the late 1970s, when he was writing, interest in computers was high, and artificial intelligence (AI) was still more of an idea than a reality. Reading Godel, Escher, Bach exposed me to some abstruse math (like undecidability, recursion, and those strange loops) but (here's where Lewis Carroll's "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles" gets referenced though some of you will say it's really a Socratic dialogue as in Xeno's fable, Achilles and the Tortoise) each chapter has a dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles and other characters to dramatize concepts. Allusions to Bach's music and Escher's art (that loves paradox) are used, as well as other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem serves as his example of describing the unique properties of minds.

From what I read about the author, he was disappointed with how Godel, Escher, Bach (GEB) was received. It certainly got good reviews - and a Pulitzer Prize - but he felt that readers and reviewers missed what he saw as the central theme. I have an older edition, but in a newer edition, he added that the theme was "a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?" I Am a Strange Loop focuses on that theme. In both books, he addresses "self-referential systems." (see link at bottom)

The image at the top of this essay is The Treachery of Images by René Magritte. It says that "This is not a pipe." That is a strange loop.

One thing that stuck with me from my first attempt at GEB is his using "meta" and defining it as meaning "about." Some people might say that it means "containing." Back in the early part of this century, I thought about that when I first began using Moodle as a learning management system. When you set up a new course in Moodle (and in other LMSs since then), it asks if this is a "metacourse." In Moodle, that means that it is a course that "automatically enrolls participants from other 'child' courses." Metacourses (AKA "master courses") feature all or part of the same content but customized to the enrollments of other sections.

This was a feature used in big courses like English or Chemistry 101. In my courses, I thought more about having things like meta-discussions or discussions about discussions. My metacourse might be a course about the course. Quite self-referential.

I suppose it can get loopy when you start saying that if we have a course x, the metacourse X could be a course to talk about course x but would not include course x within itself. Though I suppose that it could.

Have I lost you?

Certainly, metatags are quite common on web pages, photos, and for cataloging, categorizing and characterizing content objects. Each post on Serendipity35 is tagged with one or more categories and a string of keyword tags that help readers find similar content and help search engines make the post searchable.

A brief Q&A with Hofstadter published in Wired in March 2007 about the newer book says that he considers the central question for him to be "What am I?."

His examples of "strange loops" include M.C. Escher's piece, "Drawing Hands," which shows two hands drawing each other, and the sentence, "I am lying."

Hofstadter gets spiritual in his further thinking, and he finds at the core of each person a soul. He feels the "soul is an abstract pattern." Because he felt the soul is strong in mammals (weaker in insects), it brought him to vegetarianism.

He was considered to be an AI researcher, but he now thought of himself as a cognitive scientist.

Reconsidering GED, he decides that another mistake in that book's approach may have been not seeing that the human mind and smarter machines are fundamentally different. He has less of an interest in computers and claims that he always thought that his writing would "resonate with people who love literature, art, and music" more than the tech people.

If it has taken me much longer to finish Godel, Escher, Bach than it should, that makes sense if we follow the strange loop of Hofstadter's Law. ("It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.)

End Note:
A self-referential situation is one in which the forecasts made by the human agents involved serve to create the world they are trying to forecast. http://epress.anu.edu.au/cs/mobile_devices/ch04s03.html. Social systems are self-referential systems based on meaningful communication. http://www.n4bz.org/gst/gst12.htm.

Linking to the Wayback Machine

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 10:22:00 +0000

Google Search has integrated a feature that links directly to the Wayback Machine, allowing users to access archived versions of webpages through search results.

The Wayback Machine is an online archive created by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization. It allows users to access and view historical snapshots of web pages, dating back to the late 1990s. Essentially, it's like a digital time machine that lets you see how websites looked in the past. This can be useful for research, preserving digital history, or just satisfying curiosity.

By clicking the three dots next to a search result and selecting "More About This Page," users can view how a webpage appeared at different points in time. The collaboration enhances public access to web history, ensuring that digital records remain available for future generations.

Source https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-alert-access-archived-webpages-directly-through-google-search/

And Now, the AI of Gemini

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 09:26:00 +0000

ChatGPT has received a lot of attention for about a year, and it has also garnered competition. Google's entry into the AI for the masses is Gemini which has excellent web browsing and Google app integrations. Gemini provides results with often cited sources and links and has ‘Search Related Topics’ feature under some of its results allowing you to explore other search avenues you might have not considered initially. ChatGPT's paid version crawls the web but is not as effective as Gemini and for citations you need to explicitly prompt it to do so.

Gemini and ChatGPT generate images but Gemini does it for free while ChatGPT limits this function to paid plans with access to DALL-3. Then again, ChatGPT paid version might be worth it because the quality of DALL-3 images are better than those of Gemini.

Here is a features comparison from another site.

image via www.educatorstechnology.com

Parental Control of Technology

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 13:55:00 +0000

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

As the new school year begins for all students this week, a series titled "Parental Control" appears from Mozilla (Firefox) about ways to empower parents for some technology challenges. That sounds like a good thing, but particularly when it applies to schools, parental control has cons along with pros.

Many digital platforms offer parental control settings. The most common and most popular allows parents to shield young people from “inappropriate” content. Restricting "mature content" and what is "inappropriate" takes us into a controversial area. Who defines what should be restricted? Mozilla says that "the way platforms identify what that means is far from perfect."

YouTube has apologized after its family-friendly “Restricted Mode” recently blocked videos by gay, bisexual and transgender creators, sparking complaints from users. Restricted Mode is an optional parental-control feature that users can activate to avoid content that’s been flagged by an algorithm.

That example takes me back to the earliest days of the Internet in K-12 schools when filters would block searches for things like "breast cancer" because "breast" was on the list of blocked words.

Limiting screen time is another strategy and is within a parent's control but is certainly controversial within a family. Kids don't like their screen time to be limited.

Mozilla actually had questions for itself about what to call the series. They quote Jenny Radesky, an MD and Associate Professor of Pediatrics-Developmental/Behavioral at the University of Michigan, as saying that “Parental mediation is [a better] term, parental engagement is another – and probably better because it implies meaningful discussion or involvement to help kids navigate media, rather than using controlling or restricting approaches.” She pointed to research that suggests letting children manage their own media consumption may be more effective than parental control settings offered by apps.

The internet has risks, but so do parental controls. Many kids in the LGBTQI+ community can be made vulnerable by tech monitoring tools.

Sensitive information about young people can be exposed to teachers and campus administrators through the school devices they use.

As parents and eductaors, we want to protect students, especially the youngest ones. We als want to, as a society, instill in younger generations why privacy matters.

RESOURCES

Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/search/site/parents

Mozilla https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/deep-dives/parental-controls-internet-safety-for-kids/

Free Online Educational Summit July 28-29

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 18:25:00 +0000

Course Hero is a website where educators (and students) can find free resources. You need to create a free Verified Educator account which will allow you to access sample assignments, case studies, lectures, labs, syllabi, and more. These resources have been shared by higher education faculty and students. There are 80,000+ college faculty using the site to get learning resources and inspiration for your own teaching.

Your ability to download resources is gained by you uploading your original study materials. You’ll earn free unlocks for sharing your knowledge - 5 unlocks for every 10 documents submitted.

They are hosting their free 2-day 5th annual Education Summit July 28–29 from 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. PT. Their belief that teaching is a shared practice and the rapidly shifting educational landscape requires us to lean into our roles as both instructors and learners. You can join thousands of fellow educators, research experts, and instructional designers to unpack the latest in learning and pedagogy.

I first used their website when I was building a new course and was curious if any other teachers had uploaded their syllabi for a similar course. I found half a dozen that I was able to use to get started, including ones with links to readings I might also use.

Make That Informational Resource Educational

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 11:55:00 +0000

Image by Manfred Steger from Pixabay

A recent post by David Wiley is titled "The Difference Between an Informational Resource and an Educational Resource"
(Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International) He wrote "Recently I’ve been thinking about the difference between an informational resource and an educational resource. I’ve had the sense that an educational resource is an informational resource with a little something extra and have enjoyed coming back to this thought again and again over the last several weeks, trying to reduce this “something extra” to its simplest form."

Thinking about that myself, I recalled how many times as a young person I was told that a book, movie or even a TV show was "educational." But were they? A book can certainly be informational, but can a book be educational just by reading it? Wiley gives as an example an encyclopedia. Certainly it is informational if read. It has some characteristics that Wiley sees as essential: comprehensive, accurate, and well-organized. What would need to be added to make it an educational resource? Is Wikipedia educational because it has interactivity built in to it?

Another example that Wiley ponders is creating an open textbook. A book - especially a textbook - is clearly meant to be informational, but I think many of us (especially in academia) probably also consider a textbook to be "educational."

You could say that what takes a resource to educational is what you do with it. When a reader takes information about how to paint a watercolor and then starts to paint one, it seems to have moved beyond informational. But that doesn't make the resource educational, does it? What can a creator do in the creation of a resource to better insure that it can be educational?

Wiley's suggestion for that open textbook is to consider what would result if the writer (possibly a faculty member) partnered with an instructional designer? How might the book be written if along the way you are thinking about how it will be used by a teacher and student. For example, adding practice (not a new textbook component) with feedback might be one thing that moves a resource into the realm of educational.

I have a category on this blog called RESOURCES and looking over the posts there (including this one) I realize they are informational, not educational. That's not a bad thing, but it is a thing to consider in creation. If you had asked me earlier if my resources were educational, I think I would have casually replied that they were educational. You might read this post, click the link and read Wiley's original post. Good information. You might even go on to make your your next informational creation -a lecture, a handout, a textbook - educational by designing it with additional elements. That would be good - but it would not make my post or Wiley's educational. Kind of a humbling consideration.

Is Technology Destructive By Design?

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 08:55:00 +0000

Technology is good. Technology is bad. Both are true.

The highest tech has transformed the world. It has changed our culture, made information accessible to many more people, altered businesses, education, and the economy.

I came across the book, Terms of Disservice: How Silicon Valley is Destructive by Design, by Dipayan Ghosh recently. Ghosh was a Facebook public policy adviser who went into government work with President Obama's White House.

The book's title is a play on those terms of service that products offer and are often not even read by users. Though you can view this book as being negative on the effects of technology, it actually offers ideas for using technology in positive ways, such as to create a more open and accessible world. That was actually part of the original plan (or dream) for the Internet. The extra level of service he sees as lacking is consumer and civilian protections.

Ghosh is a computer scientist turned policymaker so much of the focus in the book is on industry leaders and policymakers. Technology has done a lot of good but it has also exacerbated social and political divisions. This year we are hearing again about how technology in the form of social media and cyberterrorism has influenced elections. Civilians has wittingly and unwittingly given private information to American companies which was wittingly and unwittingly passed on to terrorist groups and foreign governments.

We have heard this on an almost daily basis, and yet it seems that nothing is being done to stop it.

In an interview with the LA Review of Books, Ghosh was asked about what a broader “digital social contract” would look like. He answered, in part:

"If we can agree that this business model is premised on uninhibited data collection, the development of opaque algorithms (to enable content curation and ad targeting), and the maintenance of platform dominance (through practices that diminish market competition, including raising barriers to entry for potential rivals), then three basic components of possible intervention stand out. First, for data collection and processing, all the power currently lies within corporate entities. For now, Google can collect whatever information it desires. It can do whatever it wants with this data. It can share this information basically with whomever.

Europe’s GDPR has begun to implement some better industry norms. But to truly resolve these problems, we’ll need to transfer more power away from private firms...

We also need more transparency. Basic awareness of how this whole sector works should not be treated as some contrived trade secret. Individual consumers should have the right to understand how these businesses work, and shouldn’t just get opted in by default through an incomprehensible terms-of-service contract. We likewise need much better transparency on how platform algorithms and data-processing schemes themselves work.

And finally, we need to improve market competition. We need data-portability arrangements, interoperability agreements — and most importantly, a serious regulatory regime to contend realistically with monopolistic concentration."

One of the takeaways from this book is that these institutions are destructive by design. It reminds me of the late revelations about the American tobacco industry that they knew their products were addictive and caused health problems and designed the products to increase that addiction while they ignored and even covered up the health concerns. Can the same be said of technology products?

Useful Free Tools for Back to School From the Internet Archive

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 09:15:00 +0000

As students around the world resume their education - perhaps in a physical classroom - probably online - there is still a lot of uncertainty.

The nonprofit Internet Archive is dedicated to Universal Access to All Knowledge. They provide a number of free resources for parents, students, teachers, and librarians around the world—check out these tools for remote learning!

Over the past several months, the Internet Archive has collaborated with a number of educational specialists to determine how our collections can best serve teachers. You can leverage the Open Library to get new material or find lesson plans to make curriculum preparation easier.

Students can also access the Open Library books. For younger students, there are Kid-Friendly resources. For homework help, The Internet Archive has a huge array of textbooks and study guides. If you’re looking for primary sources to cite in your History assignments, our 26 million historical books and texts are a great place to start; if you’re trying to get through English class we also have thousands of works of literature from around the world.

There is even a huge collection of educational (and some less-educational) software and computer games if you need a study break.

The American Libraries collection includes material contributed from across the United States including the Library of Congress, many local public libraries, including material in the public domainand materials sponsored by Microsoft, Yahoo!, The Sloan Foundation, and others.